Rethinking History

Vol. 9, No. 2/3, June/September 2005, pp. 297 – 313

An Afrofuturist Reading of Ralph

Ellison’s Invisible Man
Lisa Yaszek

This article examines Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man in light of recent thinking
about Afrofuturism. As an international aesthetic movement concerned with
the relations of science, technology, and race, Afrofuturism appropriates the
narrative techniques of science fiction to put a black face on the future. In
doing so, it combats those whitewashed visions of tomorrow generated by a
global ‘futures industry’ that equates blackness with the failure of progress and
technological catastrophe. Although Ellison claimed that his novel was not
science fiction, I propose that he none-the-less deploys a range of science
fictional tropes and references throughout his work in ways that profoundly
anticipate later Afrofuturist thinking about the future of black history and
culture. In the novel proper, Ellison uses these tropes and references to signify a
number of dystopic futures where blackness is technologically managed.
However, the opening and closing scenes of Invisible Man hold forth the
possibility of a different relationship between technology, race, and art: by
hiding out under New York City and stealing electricity to power his
turntables, Ellison’s protagonist creates a space outside linear time where he
can begin to rewire the relations between past and present and art and
technology. In doing so, he becomes, however tentatively, the figurehead for a
hopeful new Afrofuture.

Keywords: Ralph Ellison; Invisible Man; Afrofuturism; History of the future;

Futures industry; Science fiction

Almost immediately upon the 1952 publication of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible

Man, literary critics hailed it as a shining example of the Great American
Novel. Despite the fact that Ellison never published another novel, Invisible
Man has remained central to the American imagination for well over half a
century. In 1953 Ellison won the National Book Award for his work, and in
ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) ª 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/13642520500149202
298 L. Yaszek
a 1965 Book Week poll 200 American critics and writers judged Invisible
Man to be the best novel of the postwar era (Corry 1995, p. 98). And the
accolades continue to accrue. As even the most casual perusal of the MLA
bibliography reveals, scholars today continue to publish dozens of books
and articles on Ellison’s novel each year. Meanwhile, laypeople such as
Christopher Schmitz of Amazon.com’s Listmania regularly rank Invisible
Man as one of the top twenty contenders for the best American novel of all
times.
Ellison himself, however, treated his book in a far more ambivalent
manner. In his acceptance speech for the National Book Award Ellison
described Invisible Man as a ‘not quite fully achieved attempt at a major
novel’ that, at best, replaced the ‘narrow naturalism’ of mainstream
literature with an experimental prose style designed to ‘challenge the
apparent forms of reality itself’ (Ellison [1953] 1994, pp. 102, 105 – 106).
More specifically, Ellison tries to rethink reality—and to rethink the
histories we tell ourselves to make sense of reality—by subjecting his
unnamed protagonist (and, by extension, his readers) to a sometimes
dizzying array of times, places, and events that do not necessarily unfold in
a linear manner.
Of course, this is not to say that Ellison saw his novel as operating in an
entirely speculative register. Indeed, as he notes somewhat testily in his
introduction to the thirty-year anniversary edition of Invisible Man, ‘a piece
of science fiction is the last thing I expected to write’ ([1982] 1989, p. xv).
And indeed, if we follow Darko Suvin’s definition of science fiction as ‘a
literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence
and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal
device is an imaginative alternative to the author’s empirical experience,’
Invisible Man is only at best a partially science fictional novel (Suvin 1979,
pp. 7 – 8). Although we as readers may indeed identify with Ellison’s
protagonist and his increasing alienation from the world around him, that
world itself remains painfully similar to our own. Ultimately, then, it seems
that Ellison did not know how to categorize his own novel because he did
not have a name for a literature predicated on both realist and speculative
modes of fiction.
Recently, however, artists and scholars have indeed coined a name for
this kind of storytelling: Afrofuturism. As Mark Dery argues, Afrofuturism
is a process of ‘signification that appropriates images of technology and a
prosthetically-enhanced future’ to address the concerns that people of
colour face in contemporary culture (Dery 1994, p. 136). First and foremost
among these concerns is the representation of history. Whatever medium
they work in, Afrofuturist artists are profoundly interested in identifying
 Rethinking History 299
those histories of the past, present, and yes, even the future that deny the
black Atlantic experience. They are also profoundly interested in the power
of the Afrofuturist artist to generate counter-histories that reweave
connections between past, present, and future in a new practice of
technoscientific storytelling.
Given this interest in alternate history, it is perhaps not surprising that
the authors who have been most closely associated with literary
Afrofuturism have been fabulists such as Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka
and science fiction authors such as Samuel Delany and Octavia Butler.1 In
this article I propose that we think about Ralph Ellison as a kind of early or
proto-Afrofuturist as well.2 After briefly reviewing the Afrofuturist
tendencies in Ellison’s critical writing I turn to a more extensive
consideration of Invisible Man itself. As with his critical writing Ellison’s
fiction powerfully anticipates the tenets of contemporary Afrofuturism,
demonstrating a very real need for black Americans—and indeed all
Americans—to resist the whitewashed social, political, and economic
futures that many of our leaders and other, more hidden persuaders
promise us. However, Ellison ultimately leaves it to the next generation of
artists to imagine what alternative futures might replace them. In this sense
his novel is not an Afrofuturist one per se. Rather, it is a literary clarion call
for an Afrofuturist imaginary that was just barely thinkable at the time of
Invisible Man’s publication.
To understand how Ellison’s novel fits into the history of Afrofuturism
we must first consider the political and aesthetic mission of Afrofuturism as
a whole movement. In its broadest dimensions Afrofuturism is an extension
of the historical recovery projects that black Atlantic intellectuals have
engaged in for well over two hundred years. According to Toni Morrison,
these projects demonstrate how the conditions of homelessness and
alienation experienced by African slaves and their descendants anticipate
what philosophers such as Nietzsche claimed were the founding conditions
of modernity (Gilroy 1993, p. 178). Thus historical, literary, and other
aesthetic representations of Afrodiasporic history insist on both the
authenticity of the black subject’s experience in Western history and
authenticity of this experience as a literal embodiment of the dislocation
felt by many modern peoples.
As a popular aesthetic movement centred on seemingly fantastic tropes
such as ‘the encounter with the alien other’ and ‘travel through time and
space,’ Afrofuturism holds the potential to bring the Afrodiasporic
experience to life in new ways. As Alondra Nelson puts it, the science
fictional elements of Afrofuturism provide both ‘apt metaphors for black
life and history’ and inspiration for ‘technical and creative innovations’ of
300 L. Yaszek
artists working in a variety of traditional and new media (http://
www.afrofuturism.net/text/about.html). Furthermore, by harnessing one
of the signature languages of modernity—the language of science fiction—
Afrofuturist artists automatically create new audiences for their stories:
those primarily young, white, Western and middle-class men who comprise
the majority of science fiction fans and who may never otherwise learn
much about the history of their country save what they haphazardly pick up
in the high school classroom.
Although there have been relatively few book-length studies of
Afrofuturism to date, scholars generally agree that the movement began
in the late 1950s with jazz musicians such as Sun Ra and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry
who presented themselves as alien visitors from other worlds.3 In the 1960s,
Black Arts Movement authors including Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka
also began telling stories about fantastic black people who travelled freely
through time and space. By blending science fictional motifs with more
conventional modes of black cultural expression these artists insisted on the
right of Afrodiasporic subjects to fully participate in the dawning space age.
After all, their stories suggested, if black men and women could imagine
themselves travelling to other worlds and other times, what right did
anyone have to prevent them from staking their claims on the future since
it was actually unfolding in the present?
With the advent of global communication and information technologies
in the 1970s and 1980s, Afrofuturist artists broadened the scope of their
attention to encompass both outer space and cyberspace. For example,
techno DJs such as Spooky That Subliminal Kid and Derek May, visual
artists such as Carrie Weems and Fatimah Tuggar, and speculative writers
including Nalo Hopkinson and Minister Faust all explore the de- and
reconstruction of Afrodiasporic subjectivity in digital culture. Taken
together, these artists demonstrate both the pervasiveness of Afrofuturism
throughout contemporary culture and the diverse ways that this aesthetic
practice has evolved in tandem with new sciences and technologies
themselves.
As its name implies, Afrofuturism is not just about reclaiming the history
of the past, but about reclaiming the history of the future as well. Kodwo
Eshun argues that our most culturally pervasive visions of tomorrow are
generated by a ‘futures industry’ that weaves together technoscientific
findings, mass media storytelling practices, and economic prediction to
make sense of its own movements. More often than not, the futures
industry conflates blackness with catastrophe. For example, Eshun notes
that ‘African social reality is overdetermined by intimidating global
scenarios, doomsday economic projections, weather predictions, medical
 Rethinking History 301
reports on AIDS, and life-expectancy forecasts, all of which predict decades
of immiserization’ (Eshun 2003, pp. 291 – 292). As such, Africa becomes a
site of absolute dystopia, an imaginary futurological space where the
persistence of black identity signifies a disastrous failure in the ongoing
progress of global capital as a whole.
Of course, these predictions are not limited to the continent of Africa.
Rather, they implicitly and explicitly structure dominant perceptions of
blackness in Atlantic nations as well. Nelson notes that over the past decade
Western discourse has become increasingly dominated by the rhetoric of
‘the digital divide,’ an expression that serves primarily as ‘a code phrase for
the tech[nical] inequities that exist between blacks and whites’ (Nelson
2002, p. 1). According to Nelson, the rhetoric of the digital divide does
more than assume that, in the best of all worlds, technology can and should
eliminate racial distinctions. It also assumes that ‘race is a liability in the
twenty-first century’ and that blackness is ‘always oppositional to
technologically-driven chronicles of progress’ (p. 1). Whether proponents
of this concept attribute the digital divide to material, economic, or cultural
differences, the end result is the same: even in the seemingly most advanced
nations black subjects cannot hope to participate fully in the world of
tomorrow.
Afrofuturist artists fight these dystopic futures in two related ways. First,
they use the vocabulary of science fiction to reconfigure the relations of
race, science and technology. Noting that ‘science fiction has long treated
[alien] people who might or might not exist,’ author Octavia Butler argues
that the genre provides an ideal language for artists interested in the
seemingly fantastic possibility that there might be Afrodiasporic subject
relations that exist outside those most commonly described by the
discourses of the futures industry (quoted in Crossley 1988, p. xvi).
Furthermore, as I have argued elsewhere, Afrofuturist artists like Butler
herself appropriate deracinated images of robots and cyborgs to specifically
politicized ends, as tropes through which to explore the appropriation of
black labour in the name of national or global progress and to celebrate
black mastery over communication and information technologies.4 As
such, these tropes become powerful tools for demonstrating the
Afrodiasporic subject’s cognitive dissent—or what W.E.B. Du Bois called
‘double consciousness’—from those visions of tomorrow that are generated
by the futures industry.
Second, Afrofuturist artists disrupt, challenge and otherwise transform
those futures with fantastic stories that, as Ruth Mayer puts it, ‘move
seamlessly back and forth through time and space, between cultural
traditions and geographic time zones’ and thus between blackness as a
302 L. Yaszek
dystopic relic of the past and as a harbinger of a new and more promising
alien future (Mayer 2000, pp. 556 – 566). For example, the Detroit
electronic duo Drexciya present themselves in the liner notes to their
albums as sea creatures evolved from the premature babies born by African
women who were raped and thrown overboard in the course of the Middle
Passage. After years of building dazzling submarine civilizations, the
Drexciyans now stand poised to head for the stars. By retelling the story of
the Middle Passage as the disturbing but ultimately triumphant tale of
strangers in a strange land, Drexciya ‘produce self-destroying narratives,
fictions that strain against the conventional pull of identification and
closure’ (Mayer 2000, p. 563). These acts of ‘chronopolitical intervention,’
as Eshun calls them, double, triple, and even quadruple readers’
consciousness about what it might mean to live in a world made by
people of colour—in other words, to live in a black future (Eshun 2003, p.
298). Thus Afrofuturist artists like Drexciya encourage disalienation from
the world of tomorrow by insisting on a multiplicity of black futures that
are distinctly alien to those whitewashed ones featured regularly in
Hollywood films, Sci-Fi Channel television programming, and glossy
computer magazines.
Although Ralph Ellison described himself as a specifically American
author rather than an exclusively Afrodiasporic one, much of his own
thinking about history, identity and artistry anticipates that of later
Afrofuturist artists and scholars. For instance, in ‘Change the joke and slip
the yoke’ he proposes that ‘the white American has charged the Negro
American with being without a past or tradition (something that strikes the
white man with a nameless horror), just as he himself has been so charged
by European and American critics with a nostalgia for the stability once
typical of European cultures. [But] the Negro knows that both were
‘‘mammy-made’’ right here at home’ (Ellison [1958a] 1994, p. 54). Much
like Toni Morrison, then, Ellison sees the Afrodiasporic experience of
homelessness and alienation as encapsulating the more general condition of
all Americans as quintessentially modern people.
At the same time Ellison—again like later Afrofuturist critics—insists
that black experiences of the New World are more than just traumatic ones.
Moreover, he explicitly links such thinking about modern blackness to the
discursive practices of the futures industry as it expressed itself in his own
day. As Ellison argued in a 1967 interview with Harper’s Magazine:

if a Negro writer is going to listen to sociologists. . .he is in trouble

because he will have abandoned his task before he begins. If he accepts
the cliché to the effect that the Negro family is usually a broken
 Rethinking History 303
family. . .if he believes that Negro males are having all these alleged
troubles with their sexuality, or that Harlem is a ‘negro ghetto’. . .well,
he’ll never see the people of whom he wishes to write. . . . [The problem
is that] our lives, since slavery, have been described mainly in terms of
our political, economic, and social conditions as measured by outside
norms, seldom in terms of our own sense of life or our own sense of
values gained from our own unique experience. (Ellison [1967] 1995,
p 113)

Here, Ellison suggests that sociological and other semi-scientific analyses of

Afrodiasporic past and present are always already conditioned by certain
ideological assumptions about the necessary opposition of blackness to
progress. In doing so, these analyses obscure the positive and fulfilling
aspects of African American subject relations as they are actually
experienced by those who live them.
For Ellison, it is the goal of the black writer—and all black people—to
reorder narrative accounts of the past and present so that audiences may
remember them differently without being too tightly bound to them. On
the one hand, Ellison celebrates a ‘Negro American consciousness that is
not a product. . .of a will to historical forgetfulness, [but] a product of our
memory, sustained and constantly reinforced by events’ (Ellison [1963/
1964] 1994, p. 124). On the other hand, he is an equally enthusiastic
proponent of the notion that ‘the United States is an international country
and its conscious character [combined with the lack of a long history]
makes it possible for us to abandon the mistakes of the past’ without
dwelling on them for too long (Ellison [1958b] 1994, p. 231). It is not only
that African Americans inherently possess an awareness of historical and
material conditions that enable them to think about the past and present
outside official representations of their own history. It is that in doing so as
subjects of modernity they can begin to move towards new futures as well.
Of course Ellison, like other Afrofuturists, is specifically concerned with
the possibility of making space for Afrodiasporic subjects in the
technology-intensive future that seemed immanent after the Second World
War. As he notes in ‘Some questions and some answers,’ science and
technology have long been brought to bear on labouring black bodies for
the profit of others. ‘But now,’ Ellison claims,

it is precisely technology which promises [us] release from the

brutalizing effects of over three hundred years of racism and European
domination. Men cannot unmake history, thus it is not a question of
reincarnating those cultural traditions which were destroyed, but a
matter of using industrialization, modern medicine, modern science
generally to work in the interest of these peoples rather than against
304 L. Yaszek
them. Nor is the disruption of the past a totally negative phenomenon;
sometimes it makes possible a modulation in a people’s way of life that
allows for a more creative use of its energies.
([1958b] 1994, pp. 264 – 65)

Thus Ellison advocates what we might call a kind of technoscientific

humanism, one that is not so much rooted in nostalgic myths of an idyllic,
organic past as it is in the recognition of how technological change in the
present may well pave the way for new and more egalitarian futures.
Not surprisingly, Ellison’s sense of a uniquely modern American
sociopolitical identity is closely related to his belief in a uniquely modern
American aesthetic practice. As a participant in a 1955 debate over ‘What’s
wrong with the american novel?’ Ellison dumbfounded his fellow panelists
by proposing that the real problem with the contemporary American novel
was not that it failed to make everyday experience fresh for readers (as the
white authors unanimously concluded), but that it failed to adequately
capture what is truly new about the modern experience—rapid social and
industrial change. As he explained, ‘in the early days when the novel came
into being. . .society had begun to shift, and the novel was about these new
things which were happening so fast that men needed to get an idea of what
was simply temporary and what was abiding. . .. Reality changes fast, and if
you don’t keep up with it, you are apt to fall into writing the same book or
the book that is expected of you’ (Ellison [1955] 1995, pp. 27, 49). For
Ellison, the goal of the contemporary writer is to induce ‘a sense of wonder’
both at the multiplicity of American realities and the speed with which they
evolve into new futures (p. 25). As such, Ellison advocates the kind of
‘chronopolitical intervention’ into dominant historical and aesthetic
representational practices championed by Afrofuturists such as Kodwo
Eshun nearly four decades later.
Ellison performs just this kind of chronopolitical intervention in Invisible
Man by inviting readers to critically assess the rhetoric of the mid-century
futures industry as it served to define appropriate modes of American—and
specifically African American—subjectivity. Ellison’s novel follows the
adventures of an unnamed protagonist who tries to become a national
leader by allying himself with various institutions: the historic black college
he attends as a young man in the south, the paint factory he works for when
he first moves north, and then finally the leftist political group known as
the Brotherhood. As I read this text in the history of Afrofuturism, what
Ellison’s protagonist is looking for is the possibility of a black future that, in
the 1930s of the novel, he cannot find. In each case his dreams of self-
realization are thwarted because he is treated as little more than a blank
 Rethinking History 305
slate upon which institutional authority projects its own vision of the
future. The most explicit acknowledgement of this comes from Mr. Norton,
the rich white college trustee who tells Ellison’s protagonist: ‘You are my
fate, young man. Only you can tell me what it really is. . .. Through you. . .I
can observe in terms of living personalities to what extent my money, my
time and my hopes have been fruitfully invested’ (pp. 42, 45). Here then the
black subject is figured as a kind of venture capital, a natural resource
available to white investors speculating in the stock market of tomorrow.
Although white members of the Brotherhood explicitly oppose
themselves to capitalists like Norton, they, too, treat black men as natural
resources rather than as human beings. This attitude is clearly encapsulated
in a Brotherhood poster entitled ‘After the Struggle: The Rainbow of
America’s Future.’ The poster depicts ‘a group of heroic figures. An
American Indian couple, representing the dispossessed past; a blond
brother (in overalls) and a leading Irish sister, representing the dispossessed
present; and [black] Brother Tod Clifton and a young white couple (it had
been felt unwise simply to show Clifton and the girl) surrounded by a
group of children of mixed races, representing the future’ (Ellison [1952]
1989, p. 385). Much like Norton, then, the Brotherhood equates blackness
with futurity, but only insofar as the black subject conforms to a predictable
and carefully controlled vision of the future of which he is not totally a part.
Like later Afrofuturists, Ellison strategically deploys the language of
science fiction to emphasize the alienation of black subjects from these
kinds of whitewashed futures. The invisible man describes his fellow college
students as ‘robots’ with ‘laced up’ minds (p. 36); later, a disillusioned black
vet dismisses the invisible man himself as ‘a walking personification of the
Negative. . .. [a] mechanical man’ (p. 94). Elsewhere in Invisible Man a black
factory worker notes that ‘we the machines inside the machine’ (p. 217),
and the Brotherhood leaders themselves treat black men as scientific
prototypes, ‘one step in the experiment’ of making society new (p. 350).
Furthermore, both during the battle royale and his stay at the paint factory
hospital, Ellison’s protagonist—much like Frankenstein’s monster—finds
himself subject to manipulation by white culture through literal applica-
tions of electricity. At the end of the battle royale the invisible man
scrambles for coins tossed on to an electrified rug by an amused group of
white townsmen; meanwhile, at the paint factory hospital white doctors
carefully administer a kind of electrical lobotomy to Ellison’s protagonist to
ensure his future docility. Taken together, these science fictional references
allow Ellison to suggest that American institutions do more than simply
conspire to ‘Keep This Nigger-Boy Running’ (p. 33). They conspire to keep
him running right into the future as well.
306 L. Yaszek
Ellison also insists that, as the alien others of America, black subjects are
defined by complex historic and material relations that cannot be
streamlined to fit institutional visions of tomorrow. For example, the
invisible man shatters Norton’s dreams of a docile black future when he
allows the trustee to meet Jim Trueblood, a black sharecropper who
accidentally impregnates his own daughter, and then after that the mad
black veterans who haunt the local tavern. In the north Ellison’s protagonist
more consciously challenges the Brotherhood’s blandly multicultural vision
of futurity when he refuses to subordinate the needs of the African
American community to the cause of international class struggle. Not
surprisingly, in both cases reprisal is swift and absolute. Confronted with
the chaos of a rural black world which refuses to respond to benevolent
white paternalism, Norton suffers a nervous breakdown and the invisible
man is banished from school. Similarly, when Brotherhood leaders are
confronted with what they perceive to be the chaos of the invisible man’s
adherence to the backward past of racial community they immediately
relieve him of his position as the head of the Brotherhood’s Harlem
chapter. In essence, then, the invisible man loses his status as a symbol of
futurity precisely because he cannot—or will not—reinforce those official
future histories that relegate all kinds of disruptive black behaviour to the
safety of a sealed-off past.
Of course it is not enough for Ellison’s protagonist to simply witness
what he calls ‘the boomerang of history.’ Eventually he must learn to take
control of history and deny those whitewashed histories of the future
predicated on the erasure of black subjectivity. He learns this lesson from
Brother Tarp, an unassuming old man who becomes a kind of
spokesperson for Afrofuturity. As a young man in the south, Tarp refuses
to give up his possessions to a white man; later, he refuses to accept the
sentence of life imprisonment he receives for doing so, and, after nineteen
years of patient waiting, he finds his opportunity and escapes to the north.
As he tells the invisible man: ‘I said no to a man who wanted to take
something from me; that’s what it cost me for saying no and even now the
debt ain’t fully paid and will never be paid in their terms. . .. I said no. . .I
said hell no! And I kept saying no until I broke the chain and left’ (p. 387).
Significantly, this passage does more than demonstrate one man’s refusal to
play the role that has been socially scripted for him. It shows how, in
refusing this role, one man can change the future: Tarp’s ‘debt’—such as it
is—will never be paid because he refuses to become the subservient black
man he is supposed to be. Instead, he removes himself from the future that
has been imposed on him and allies himself with the Brotherhood in the
hope of a better tomorrow.
 Rethinking History 307
But if Ellison’s protagonist says no to all those whitewashed futures that
deny the complexity of his history and identity—including, eventually,
those offered by the Brotherhood—what is left to him? Towards the end of
the novel he encounters two possible black futures, but neither seem
particularly satisfactory. Ras the Exhorter/Destroyer dreams of a Black
Nationalist future in Africa, but his is a dream of tomorrow that has been
pieced together from nothing more than an artificial past. Ras rides to
battle during the Harlem riots in his ‘foreign costume,’ hefting a spear like
‘the kind you see them African guys carrying in the moving pictures’ and
riding his horse ‘like Heigho, the goddam Silver’ (pp. 563 – 564). This leads
the invisible man to conclude that the separatist is ‘funny and dangerous
and sad’ (p. 564): dangerous because he dares to dream of preserving an
authentic black identity through rebellion and revolution, but funny and
sad because these same dreams are always already mediated by the
narratives of white culture through which he speaks them.
The other black future is embodied by Rinehart, a man who rules the
Harlem underworld by shifting into whatever role is appropriate to the
moment: lover or fighter, preacher or pimp, gangster or police informant.
Rinehart ‘opens up a new section of reality’ for Ellison’s protagonist
precisely because, like Tarp, he says no to any one predetermined future. As
the invisible man himself puts it: ‘his world was possibility and he knew it’
(pp. 499, 498). But possibility alone is not enough to ensure a viable black
future—indeed, it turns out to do quite the opposite. Taking his cue from
Rinehart, the invisible man decides to become all things to all people,
cheerfully assuring the Brotherhood that he has Harlem well under control
while solemnly assuring the people of Harlem that they have every right to
be angry at the way they have been treated by white politicians—including,
implicitly, the Brotherhood itself. Unfortunately, the invisible man’s plan
backfires and, rather than coming to a collective awareness that it must find
its own destiny, Harlem explodes in a night of apocalyptic rioting that tears
the community apart and leaves the invisible man trapped in the sewers
beneath New York City.
Stunned by the disastrous chain of events he has triggered, Ellison’s
protagonist decides to refuse history—including the history of the future—
altogether. After a feverish dream in which the invisible man finally
recognizes that until now he has been nothing more than a sacrifice to the
‘iron man’ of industrial futurity, he concludes, ‘I couldn’t return to Mary’s,
or to any part of my old life. . .. No, I couldn’t return to Mary’s, or to the
campus, or to the Brotherhood, or home. I could only move ahead or stay
here, underground. So I would stay here until I was chased out’ (p. 571).
Here, then, Ellison’s protagonist goes beyond Tarp and all the other black
308 L. Yaszek
subjects who have said no to the historical trajectories predetermined for
them by institutional authorities. Rather than running either backward into
a sentimentalized yesterday or forward into a whitewashed tomorrow, he
instead opts out of linear time altogether.
Although the invisible man’s decision to stay underground marks the
end of Ellison’s novel proper, it is not the end of his protagonist’s story.
Ellison’s portrait of the artist as a young man is framed by a prologue and
epilogue that reveal what happens to the invisible man as he moves into
middle age during his long stay underground.5 In short, he finally learns
who he is—and who he may someday be—as both a black man and an
American:

Like almost everyone else in this country I started out with my share of
optimism. I believed in hard work and progress and action, but now,
after being first ‘for’ society and then ‘against’ it, I assign myself no rank
or any limit, and such an attitude is very much against the trend of the
times. . .. Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway?—diversity
is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant
states. . .. America is woven of many strands, I would recognize them and
let it remain so. . .. This is not prophecy, but description.
(pp. 576 – 577)

In essence, then, the invisible man’s basement home becomes a kind of

time- and spaceship that carries him outside of the known world, providing
him with a new perspective from which he can see both the multiple aspects
of the Afrodiasporic experience and its complex relations to the ‘many
strands’ of American reality. Much like Kodwo Eshun’s ideal Afrofuturist
subject, then, Ellison’s protagonist begins to experience the kind of multiple
consciousness that is itself the first step towards the creation of a new and
more egalitarian multiracial futurity.
Significantly, the invisible man’s ability to multiply his consciousness
directly correlates with his increasing mastery over new technologies. As
Alexander G. Weheliye notes in his discussion of sonic Afromodernity, the
‘hegemony of vision’’ and visual technologies is a distinctly raced one in
which the privileged ‘look of white subjects deduces supposed inferior
racial characteristics from the surface of the black subject’s skin’ (2003,
p. 107). By way of contrast, sonic technologies that enable the recording
and mass distribution of sound both transform and extend what Weheliye
identifies as ‘the two main techniques of cultural communication in African
America’: orality and music (ibid., p. 102). These technologies are useful for
both musicians and other artists who incorporate sonic elements into their
work because they ‘open up possibilities for thinking, hearing, seeing, and
 Rethinking History 309
apprehending the subject in a number of different arenas that do not insist
on monocausality’ (ibid.). In many respects, ‘the sonic’ functions like ‘the
science fictional’ in Afrodiasporic art: both provide alternate means by
which to rethink history and subjectivity outside of dominant visual and
discursive structures.
This is certainly true of Ellison’s novel. Throughout the main story
Ellison links his protagonist’s most rote or robotic behaviour to the tyranny
of mainstream visual technologies. For instance, when the invisible man
first moves to New York City he spends much of his time mentally (and
physically) refashioning himself to conform to Hollywood visions of
American success: ‘I imagined myself making a speech and caught in
striking poses by flashing cameras, snapped at the end of some period of
dazzling eloquence. . .. I would hardly ever speak above a whisper and I
would always be—yes, there was no other word, I would be charming. Like
Ronald Coleman’ (p. 164). Later when the invisible man learns to just say
no to mass-produced reality be begins to recognize its insidious influence
on other black subjects as well. Indeed, he ultimately rejects Ras’ dream of a
natural African subjectivity precisely because he comes to recognize it as
simply one more pastiche of old movie imagery. Much like the young
invisible man, then, Ras turns out to be not so much a producer of new
ideas about what it might mean to be the black subject of futurity as a
mindless consumer of secondhand ideas and imagery.
But when the invisible man finally retreats to his subterranean chamber,
he transforms from robotic consumer to proto-hacker who diverts power
from that bastion of white theatrical culture—Broadway—to fuel his own
sonic technologies. In contrast to the films and magazines that falsely
assured the invisible man social recognition if he simply looked the part,
the invisible man’s turntable, stacked with Louis Armstrong records, speaks
directly to his newfound understanding of black invisibility: ‘invisibility. . .
gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat.
Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and
imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points
where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. That’s what you hear
vaguely in [blues and jazz] music’ (p. 8). Little wonder, then, that Ellison’s
protagonist dreams of wiring not just two or three but four more turntables
to his original one. After all, if one Armstrong recording fosters the invisible
man’s sense of double consciousness, then five played at once may well
catapult him into a truly expansive and multifaceted Afrofuturist
subjectivity.6
And indeed, during his time underground, Ellison’s protagonist does
become a proto-Afrofuturist author. Inspired by his newfound ability to
310 L. Yaszek
‘see around corners,’ the invisible man begins rethinking the relations of his
past and present and mapping the networks of power that would propel
him into various futures not of his own making. In essence, then, the story
that emerges from this new kind of contemplative activity—the story of
Invisible Man—exemplifies Afrofuturist narrative practice as Ruth Mayer
describes it, moving ‘seamlessly back and forth through time and space,
between cultural traditions and geographic time zones’ (Mayer 2000, pp.
556 – 566). Thus the invisible man’s subterranean spaceship, propelled by
sonic technologies, carries Ellison’s protagonist towards a new identity, a
new aesthetic practice, and perhaps, finally, to a truly new future.
But the invisible man never actually gets to that future. In the final pages
of the novel Ellison’s protagonist claims that ‘in spite of myself I’ve learned
some things. . .. A decision has been made. I’m shaking off the old skin. . ..
I’m coming out, no less invisible. . .but coming out nonetheless’ (pp. 579,
581). However, he still does not seem to know what he must do if he does
return to the world: ‘it escapes me. What do I really want, I’ve asked myself.
Certainly not the freedom of a Rinehart or the power of [the Brotherhood],
nor simply the freedom not to run. No, but the next step I [can’t] make, so
I’ve remained in the hole’ (p. 574). As such, the invisible man remains
perpetually on the edge of revelation and the edge of action, aware that he
holds within him the possibility of a new future, but one that is not yet
quite ready to unfold.
At the beginning of this article I proposed that Invisible Man is most
accurately thought of as an antecedent to, rather than as a full-blown
example of, Afrofuturist literature. On the one hand, Ellison’s novel
performs an important act of chronopolitical intervention into conven-
tional thinking about the future. On the other hand, it does not offer
readers any alternative futures—black, white, or any other colour. Thus its
place in the canon of Afrofuturism as a call for precisely this kind of future-
historical art. As an author who saw his own fiction as an updated variant
on that of the nineteenth-century realist authors who preceded him, Ellison
primarily looked backwards to rewrite the past and present. But he did so
in a way that powerfully previews how the next generation of Afrodiasporic
artists could—and would—write about the history of the future as well.

Notes
[1] For discussions of Afrofuturist elements in Ishmael Reed’s fiction, see Alondra
Nelson’s introduction to the Social Text special issue on Afrofuturism (2002) and
Roxanne Harde’s ‘ ‘‘We will make our own Future Text’’: allegory, iconoclasm, and
reverence in Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo’ (2003). For a similar discussion of
 Rethinking History 311
Amiri Baraka, see Paul Youngquist’s ‘The space machine: Baraka and science
fiction.’ For explorations of Afrofuturism in science fiction, see Mark Dery’s ‘Black
to the future: interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose’ (1993);
Gregory Rutledge’s ‘Black futurist fiction and fantasy: The racial establishment’
(2001) and ‘Science fiction and the black power/arts movement: The transpositional
cosmogony of Samuel R. Delany Jr.’ (2002); and Marilyn Mehaffy and AnaLouise
Keating’s ‘ ‘‘Radio Imagination’’: Octavia Butler on the Poetics of Narrative
Embodiment’ (2001). Reed, Baraka, Delany and Butler are also featured
prominently on Alonda Nelson and Paul D. Miller’s Afrofuturism website.
[2] Afrofuturist scholars including Alondra Nelson, Mark Dery and Sheree R. Thomas
all acknowledge Ellison’s place in early Afrofuturist history. To date, however, I
have found only one other sustained exploration of this subject: Alexander G.
Weheliye’s ‘ ‘‘I am I be’’: the subject of Sonic Afro-modernity’ (2003).
[3] At the time of writing there is only one book-length critical study, three literary
anthologies and one website devoted to Afrofuturism. For further reading on this
subject, see, respectively, Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in
Sonic Fictions (1999); Sheree R. Thomas’ Dark Matters: A Century of Speculative
Fiction from the African Diaspora (2000), and Dark Matters: Reading the Bones
(2004); Nalo Hopkinson’s Whispers From the Cotton Tree: Caribbean Fabulist
Fiction (2000); and Alondra Nelson’s Afrofuturism.net (2000).
[4] For further discussion of black technosubjects in science fiction, see Lisa Yaszek,
The Self Wired: Technology and Subjectivity in Contemporary Narrative (2002). See
also Jeboon Ye’s ‘The representation of inappropriate/d others: the epistemology of
Donna Haraway’s cyborg feminism and Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series’ (2004),
and Rebecca Holden’s ‘The high costs of cyborg survival: Octavia Butler’s
Xenogenesis trilogy’ (1998). For a related discussion of Afrodiasporic engagements
with (and appropriations of) cybernetic sciences and technologies, see Ron Eglash’s
‘African influences in cybernetics’ (1995). For in-depth exploration of black
technosubjects in the popular music industry, see Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant
than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fictions (1999).
[5] The invisible man’s underground sojourn is indeed a long one. According to Patrick
W. Shaw, the chronology of the novel indicates that he stays in his basement from
1931 – 1948, or seventeen years (1990, p. 119).
[6] Indeed, Afrofuturist scholars including Kodwo Eshun and Alexander G. Weheliye
regularly cite this passage from Ellison in their assessments of sonic Afrofuturism.
As Weheliye notes, there has been a great deal of critical discussion regarding
Ellison’s use of jazz and the blues in his novel, but until the advent of Afrofuturist
scholarship most of this discussion glossed over the technological aspects of black
popular music. As such, they miss a key element of Ellison’s thinking about
technologically mediated subjectivity (Weheliye 2003, p. 100). For further
discussion of sonic Afrofuturism as it pertains to Ellison see Eshun’s ‘Further
considerations on Afrofuturism’ (2003) and Weheliye’s ‘ ‘‘I am I be’’: the subject of
sonic Afro-modernity’ (2003). For two recent but more conventional treatments of
music in Ellison, A. see Timothy Spaulding’s ‘Embracing chaos in narrative form:
the bebop aesthetic in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man’ (2004), and Wilfred Raussert’s
‘Jazz, time, and narrativity’ (2000).
312 L. Yaszek

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